Happy Return [antikvár]

Preface The essays that make up the present volume, covering a wide range of topics in British and American Studies, were specially commissioned on an invitational basis to celebrate the 70th birthday of Professor István Pálffy, teacher, mentor, colleague and/or friend of all the authors whose work is published here. In a Preface to a collection of essays written in his honour it seems appropriate to trace the most important stages of Professor Pálffy's career as teacher/pedagogue, scholar, theatre critic and self-appointed cultural diplomat. István Pálffy was born on 14 August 1929 in Debrecen. His father was a leading journalist and newspaper editor; his mother a nurse of Czech origin. After he finished secondary school in 1947, he started to read Hungarian, English and Russian at the University of Debrecen. Since in 1949 the operation of the English Department was 'temporarily' suspended, he graduated as a teacher of Russian in 1952. During his final year at university, he was a teaching assistant at the Russian Institute of the University of Szeged. After graduation he taught Russian at the Debrecen Medical School but one year later he became employed as a Russian teacher trainee by the renowned Mihály Fazekas Secondary School, which at the time was the teacher training school of the University of Debrecen (by then renamed Lajos Kossuth University). When the English Department was reopened in 1958, he could continue his English studies, and got his degree in English a year later. 1961 turned out to be an important year of new perspectives in his career. One the one hand, he was offered a job at the Lajos Kossuth Teacher Training Secondary School from where he was soon to move on to the university, and, on the other hand, this is the year when his scholarly ambitions were officially recognised by granting him the university doctorate. His thesis—dealing with the reception of G. B. Shaw's works in Hungary between 1903-1919—was the synthesis of devoted philological research and first-hand theatre experience and expertise. In addition to working as a full-time secondary school teacher, teacher trainee and county supervisor of teachers of English, since 1959 he was regularly publishing theatre and book reviews, scholarly articles on language teaching and Anglo-Hungarian literary relations; throughout all this period, he was also involved in local amateur theatre as performer, script-writer and director.